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Monthly Archives: March 2010

Shoeshine (1946, Italy, de Sica) – Two boys try to make a living on the streets of Rome, but end up in juvenile prison, where they are hurled towards inevitable doom. The system is to blame. Watched it all.

Heartbeat (1946, USA, Wood) – Some guy runs a school for pickpockets in Paris. He invites people to job interviews, and recruits the candidates who take the opportunity to steal from him. The premise is so great that it’s a shame everything else sucks. Watched: 16 minutes.

Night and Day (1946, USA, Curtiz) – Cole Porter was young once too, and faced adversity etc. But not too young, or too much adversity, or they couldn’t have gotten Cary Grant to play him. Watched: 11 minutes.

Colonel Effingham’s Raid (1946, USA, Pichel) – A Colonel Blimp goes to war against a city government run by corrupt carpetbaggers who want to remove symbols of the town’s Confederate past. Think of it as a Mr Smith Goes to Washington but with implicit racism and an obsession with women’s legs. As in, every time the Shockingly Independent Woman With a Job enters the screen, the camera zooms in on her legs, and we hear a crowd whistle appreciatively. Pretty bad, but hard to stop watching. Watched it all.

Centennial Summer (1946, USA, Preminger) – Life of some stupid family during the 1876 Centennial celebration. Hey, I just read a Flashman novel set at that time. Quite interesting. Indian wars and everything. Did you know scalping isn’t fatal? Watched: 6 minutes.

Though immigration and integration have become major points of contention in Europe, they weren’t even open for discussion when I was first living in Oslo. On these topics, the “one idea” of the “one-idea state” was clear: Muslims in Europe were a colorful and enriching asset – period. In Norway, the expression on everyone’s lips was “fargerik felleskap” – “colorful community”. On the rare occasions when immigrants were mentioned on TV or in the press, you could be sure these words would figure prominently. Norwegian journalists, professors, and politicians loved to use the term. But from the beginning, I found it offensive. Its fixation on the skin color mocked Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society, and its reduction of immigrants to their most superficial aspect turned them into mere window-dressing – an outward sign of ethnic Norwegians’ inner virtue. Often, hearing and reading comments on immigration by Norwegian establishment types, I nearly gasped at their grotesque condescension, their inability to see immigrants as individuals, and their view of the whole business as a morality play; with Muslims in the role of needy victims and Norwegians as heroic benefactors.

Three Strangers (1946, USA, Negulesco) – Three strangers of deplorable character meet under the statue of a Chinese goddess to pray for the one thing that will make them happy: Money. They then go out and destroy their lives beyond the repair of any divine power. Watched it all.

She-Wolf of London (1946, USA, Yarbrough) – Gah. Watched: 7 minutes, which I’ve already forgotten. The Warren Zevon song is pretty good though. Also the one about that headless Norwegian. Hm, where did I put my Zevon songs?

Green for Danger (1946, UK, Gilliat) – The problem with stopping movies when I don’t like the beginning is that some of them get better afterwards. If I had stopped this one after the first 25 minutes, where people at a hospital just walk around being miserable, I would have missed the part where it turns into a dark, witty whodunnit. Watched it all.

The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946, USA, Lubin) – These monster movies would be a lot more interesting if they didn’t spend the first half trying to ease us slowly into the fantastic premise. Watched: 3 minutes, then fast-forwarded to see the spider, but there isn’t any. There is an evil mansion that burns down at the end, though.

The Bamboo Blonde (1946, USA, Mann) – This is the second ’46 Anthony Mann movie that is absolutely terrible .. and yet I find myself watching it to the end. Who is this guy? This one is sort of a cheap version of a Preston Sturges movie, featuring Stan the used boat salesman from Monkey Island. Watched it all.

Till the End of Time (1946, USA, Dmytryk) – Marines come home from the war, and find that nobody wants to know what they’ve been through. The war has created a gulf between those who fought, and those who didn’t. Watched it all.

Magnificent Doll (1946, USA, Borzage) – Abandoning the White House during the 1812 war with Britain, Ginger Rogers makes sure to take with her the original Declaration of Independence and the portrait of George Washington. Watched: 4 minutes.

The Dark Mirror (1946, USA, Siodmak) – Either Olivia de Havilland or her identical twin Olivia de Havilland have murdered a man, and they won’t say which one. Faced with this conundrum, the police is helpless. Watched: 16 minutes.

Strange Impersonation (1946, USA, Mann) – The weirdest noir so far, with some really inventive touches, such as all the main characters being women, so I don’t mind that it’s terrible. Watched it all. IMDB reviewers complain that this isn’t strictly noir or strictly good or strictly coherent, which is to miss the point: It’s strange and fun!

Till the Clouds Roll By (1946, USA) – All these biopics are the same. This one’s about Jerome Kern, some composer who I’m sure faced the usual adversity etc. etc. Watched: 9 minutes.

Wanted for Murder (1946, UK, Huntington) – A woman dates a psychotic asshole, despite there being a perfectly fine nice guy available. He’s probably the murderer referred to in the title, (unless it’s the nice guy, you can never trust these quiet ones). Watched: 17 minutes.

When the Algerian rebellion started in 1954, Algeria had a population of 1 million Europeans, known as the pied-noirs. France thought of Algeria as France, and the pied-noirs thought of it as home. To lose it was inconceivable.

The war started because France refused to grant the Algerians political rights. Even assimilated Algerians were distrusted by the French, who feared the power of the Muslim hordes.

Algerians formed the FLN, which used a combination of guerilla and terrorist tactics. Their terrorist activity reached a peak in 1957 with the Battle of Algiers, which resulted in a fantastic movie but was a strategic mistake.

Their failure to defeat the FLN caused the fall of multiple governments, and the French political and military elite turned in despair to Charles de Gaulle, who agreed to take over if he could write a new constitution. This created the Fifth Republic, which is still in place.

His backers expected de Gaulle to continue the war, but de Gaulle didn’t take orders from anyone. When he began to hint that France would have to let Algeria go, the army attempted a coup in 1961, which failed. Segments of the army and the pied-noirs formed a terrorist organization of their own, the OAS, whose pointless, brutal terrorist campaign alienated the French public, and made it impossible for the pied-noirs to remain after independence.

The second worst outcome of conflict, after genocide, is mass migration, and this is what happened to the pied-noirs after Algeria became independent in 1962: They all emigrated, mostly to France, where they were assimilated.

No Regrets For Our Youth (1946, Japan, Kurosawa) – A group of anti-militarist students try to find their place in the Japan of the 30′s and early 40′s, but there isn’t any. All they have is old ideals and a dream that things may one day be different. Watched it all.

Cloak and Dagger (1946, USA, Lang) – The OSS recruits Manhattan Project scientist Gary Cooper to go to German-occupied Europe as a spy, to prevent the Nazis from acquiring the nuclear bomb. Oh come on, that’s just retarded. Well, maybe Feynman could have done something like that. Watched: 13 minutes. Btw, the Office of Strategic Services is a much cooler name for a spy organization than the Central Intelligence Agency.

I See a Dark Stranger (1946, UK, Launder) – Raised on stories about British atrocities, Deborah Kerr goes to Dublin to join the IRA. Turns out the old IRA isn’t very active these days, what with the independence and all, but Nazi Germany wouldn’t mind some help with their heroic struggle against the British. Watched it all.

Mysterious Intruder (1946, USA, Castle) – An old man hires a private detective to find a girl who lived nearby. All he remembers about her is that she was 14, and had long, blonde curls. Okay, that’s creepy. Watched: 6 minutes.

A Night in Casablanca (1946, USA, Mayo) – The Marx Brothers are getting old, literally. But this is pretty good for one of their later movies. The jokes are actually funny, and the rest doesn’t get in the way. Watched it all. Of course, Horse Feathers is five times funnier. And Duck Soup. And A Night at the Opera. Did I mention that the Marx Brothers are the only 30′s and 40′s comedy team that was funny? I had no idea before I started this marathon, but it’s true, or at least interesting.

Angel on My Shoulder (1946, USA, Mayo!) – A murdered gangster goes to Hell, where Satan recruits him to spread the cause of gangsterism back on Earth. I guess that’s plan B after Nazism failed. Watched: 17 minutes.